How To Stop People Pleasing?

There are many ways in which you can give up this toxic activity. Yes, trying too much to please people can hijack a good portion of your life and transform it into something you are not proud of. Whatever argument is able to win you on its side, it’s important to understand that you cannot simply decide to stop being a people pleasing overnight. Some time is needed in order to accommodate the transition.

Putting new borders between you and the other can definitely help create obstacles in the way of your instinct to please people. Let’s say you decide to spend less time with people from your social circle. Inevitably, you will grow less attached to the mechanism that is draining resources from you. Learning to say “no” more often can be a big life lesson for some of us. Although portrayed as the first step towards becoming a pessimist, having a more reluctant way of looking at things can offer you the needed space to carry on with your actual interests, without minding the others too much.

It’s impossible to please everyone at the same time and you should stop thinking about it. No one has ever managed to please both inner and outer critics, and a life in which you seek to balance the two sides is definitely not worth living. People who seem to please everyone are most likely liars. They take alternatively many faces and know what face to turn in which direction and at what moment. But these chameleons of society often find themselves in an identity crisis after so much switching. One of the masks might actually get stuck on them.

Focusing towards your own person and towards your real needs is the most constructive way to give up the instinct of pleasing people. Far from embracing narcissism or any form of hedonism, focusing towards yourself should be seen as a process of re-evaluating the main coordinates of your life. While you understand your true and inner needs, you also understand what resources you have at your disposal for accomplishing the goals you might have in mind. As you stop focusing at the others, you become able to bring concrete positive actions into your life, and that can be indeed very rewarding. Focusing inside yourself can help you build self-esteem, a crucial component of the immunity system you need to have for a healthy life.

Most individuals are people pleasers because they seek validation in return. Being accepted by the others is the fundament of any social group, but it should never go too much outside the background of daily activities. If you put validation in the center of your life, you will create a vicious circle outside which is very difficult to get. You do need a bit of validation in order to stay on track with your life, but creating a protocol of validation for each step you take on the stage of life will quickly drain away any pleasure of being there.

The instinct to be a people pleaser is often the result of an increased sensitivity. In many cases, the people you fear disappointing actually don’t care so much as you think. Your mind can distort the reality of every relationship, putting you much more in the open than you actually are. Although that sensitivity can be harnessed to become a very good social skill, it is a good idea to learn how to shift it in a lower gear. A lot of exercise is needed here, as that extended sensitivity can be a personality trait, which is well engraved in your code. Make sure you are not fighting the windmills as you go head to head with the attempt to change the inner layers of your social identity.

Once you learn how much you skip from life by trying too much to please people all the time, it is time to take action and use the above described advices on a daily basis. Although people will perceive your change as something a bit intrusive and even rude, they will eventually get used to your new way of putting everything in balance.